Being a poet himself, Percy Bysshe Shelley was fairly starry-eyed about poetry. Poets, he wrote in his celebrated treatise, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. It has to be said that most of the world, then and now, has agreed to differ. Poetry is small beer in comparison to cinema, TV, the novel. Even publishers care less and less. Once upon a time, poetry was felt to be important, [...]

Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was one of the great literary, cultural and artistic polymaths of the 20th century. In addition to his huge contribution to the visual arts - he was a painter, draughtsman and printmaker - he wrote a tonnage of fiction, poetry and cultural criticism, from novels such as The Apes of God (1930), which mercilessly satirised his effete contem poraries (not least those pseudo-revolutionary members of the [...]

As I stare out to sea from the Leas, Folkestone, I think about how some old seaside towns seem to be living posthumous lives. The Leas itself, a beautiful one-and-a-half-mile stretch of manicured lawn, overlooks the English Channel. On a clear day you can see the combine harvesters on the French side, patiently combing the rucked earth. Not today, though. It's just too hot and dry and hazy on this [...]

Look at any constellation up in the night sky. Some stars will be shining more brightly than others. I am standing in a sepulchrally long and dark gallery when that thought occurs to me, staring up at a new photographic installation by Mat Collishaw. Images of grievously wounded children are flashing momentarily on all four walls and, just as quickly, fading away again. The walls themselves are covered with phosphorescent [...]

Early this month, 20 new paintings by Howard Hodgkin went on show at the Gagosian Gallery in Britannia Street, one of London's largest, and therefore most demanding, private spaces. The setting is sleek: polished grey concrete floors, soaring white walls, and no indiscreet references to whether or not anything is on sale to the general public - or, if so, for how much.

All the paintings on these walls were [...]

Imagine you are constantly on the road. It is the life you have chosen. Every day brings a new city, the ghastly distortion of new dressing-room mirrors, more adulation from people young enough to be your grandchildren. The songs don't flow like they used to; the gushing stream of words has slowed to a trickle. There are long stretches of time when you want to say something without speaking, something [...]

It seems fitting that W G Sebald's enthrallingly graphic and gruesome account of the firebombing of Hamburg in 1943 should have been published after his death in a book of essays entitled On the Natural History of Destruction. One of the many remarkable things he has to tell us in those essays concerns the witness to war of the defeated. A strange silence fell upon German writers in the aftermath [...]

The Chinese are coming, cry the commentators, economic and political. Hold on a minute, reply the poets, those unacknowledged legislators, as they stroke their timeless beards: the Chinese have already been and gone, leaving an indelible mark upon 20th-century poetry in the west. Poetry today would not be what it is without those Chinese from way back when.

Proof of this surprising assertion is to be found in a remarkable [...]

In Eastern Europe during the decades before communism fell, samizdat literature possessed a raw, pent-up energy precisely because officially it was not allowed to exist. Artists and writers were beating with their fists on their own prison walls. "Is something similar still happening in Cuba?" I ask myself as I walk around a beautifully displayed exhibition of work by six Cuban artists who live and work in Havana, some well-established, [...]

What exactly are poems? And what are they good for? In the 20th century the pre-eminent poetic mode was the lyric, and so poems, gen erally speaking, were short, explosive devices. Many famous longer poems were written then, too - William Carlos Williams's Paterson and Ezra Pound's Cantos, for example. Yet neither of these was entirely successful because, in part, they seemed to be occupying some uneasy middle ground between [...]